In the 1700’s, there was no standard of measurement.

Every village had its own unit. By some estimates, there were 250,000 different units in France alone.

This made commerce and mapmaking so difficult that the French government created a special bureau to standardize things.

And they decided to create the meter—which they defined as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. The problem was they had no way to measure that.

So, they made a painstaking, seven-year-long survey of the exact distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona and used the latitudes of those two cities to calculate the distance from equator to pole—which took another year.

They divided that appropriately, then cast a platinum bar of that exact length, to create the meter standard. Thirty copies were sent around the world as the basis for the metric system.

The bureau created a system of prefixes to denote multiples and divisions of the meter. A thousand meters is a kilometer. One-thousandth of a meter is a millimeter.

Modern computers, telescopes and microscopes have required ever larger, and smaller, increments—we’re now up to quettameters, which is a thousand times the diameter of the universe!

As our scientific instruments get ever more capable, we’ll need more terms for an ever expanding, and shrinking, metric system.